With the increase in wireless technologies, the computer world of a decade ago is quickly evolving into a wireless world. Beginning with the explosion of the wireless phone, people have become more mobile, but, at the same time, becoming less isolated when in motion. Short-range wireless business networks and public Hotspots allow users to access the Internet from a wireless-equipped personal data assistant (PDA) or laptop. Even before the prevalence of these short-range wireless networks, information exchange had been implemented using wireless telephone technology. Because of the near ubiquity of cellular phones, the mobile phone network would seem to be the perfect medium for providing information wirelessly. However, because of the limited nature of wireless phones and the data handling capabilities of wireless telecommunication networks, the resulting information systems have not achieved much popularity with consumers.
One of the major reasons that the wireless phone-based information systems have not enjoyed the same success as the short-range wireless networks is likely due to the overall user experience. Of course, the user experience is largely driven by the available bandwidth in the network, but the users, who actually subscribe to and pay for these services generally do not care what the bandwidth availability is, just as long as the user experience is satisfying.
One of the first technologies that was used to pass information to a wireless phone user was Small Message Service (SMS). SMS is a text service that enables short messages of generally no more than 140-160 characters in length to be sent and transmitted from a mobile phone. In such a system, a user would typically log onto a particular Web site or sign up through some interactive telecommunications service to receive periodic small messages of interest. For example, a user could call into a service provider and sign up to receive the sports scores for their favorite basketball team or teams. Thereafter, when the service provider compiles the scores for the basketball games, a short text message would be forwarded to the user's mobile phone, or whatever other mobile device that was designated. The only interaction by the user is typically on the initial set-up of the service, whether that set-up occurred using an Internet-connected computer, via telephone, or the like. SMS allowed for the user to receive information; however, because the system was so limited in message-length and restricted to text, the user experience was typically dull.
The next step in wireless information technology was largely driven by the explosion of the World Wide Web. Web browsers, which are so prevalent in everyday life, were scaled down for use in mobile phones. The microbrowser provides browser-like functionality to the mobile phone, albeit at a much reduced level. Due to the limited memory and processing power of mobile phones, early microbrowsers used Wireless Access Protocol (WAP) and Wireless Mark-up Language (WML), which attempted to mimic the full-scale standards of hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP) and hypertext mark-up language (HTML). More recently, as the ability of the mobile phones has increased, some microbrowsers actually use HTML browsers.
The paradigm of the microbrowser operates in much the same manner as a full-scaled Web browser. A Web page, which may be a WAP page or an HTML page, is downloaded from a Web server, again, which could be a WAP server or HTTP server, to a user's phone. Either by activating standard navigation elements or hypertext links, subsequent Web pages are downloaded to the microbrowser for the user to view. The user's interaction is similar to that in a Web browser except without the graphical richness. The user can hit forward or back or, through some substantial key-strokes, enter a Web site address. Because of the device and bandwidth restrictions in the mobile telecommunication area, the main noticeable difference between the microbrowser paradigm and the Web browser is that the majority of information on the “micro” pages is textual.
In application, the microbrowser offered a greater variety and reach of information than the SMS systems. Moreover, the user is afforded a greater interactivity by being allowed to “surf” to any desired and compatible Web site or Web page. However, in operation, the user experience could be described as click-and-wait, rather than click-and-view. Because of both the slowness of the roundtrip transmission of a user interaction on the phone to a central server and the subsequent return of the data to that phone in combination with a relatively large amount of data is transmitted over the wireless network to the phone for each Web page, a large latency existed between the page request and the final download and display of the page. Latency is also affected by data disconnects that occur due to things such as the hand-offs of the mobile device between mobile towers and other such network disconnects, such as when a user drives through tunnels, and the like. This large latency period experienced by most wireless phone Internet users limited the appeal of the microbrowser system. Furthermore, because many service providers placed a per minute usage charge on accessing the Internet over a mobile phone, the long latency generally meant higher costs for a service where the waiting time could exceed the actual information interaction time.
Several ideas followed the microbrowser attempting to address the problems it exhibited. One solution that addressed the long latency periods and lack of graphical experience was the stored-page approach. Instead of receiving information over the wireless telephone network, the user connects a device to a computer with an Internet connection. Based on site preferences that a user may have set up, the Web pages for any particular Web site are downloaded into the memory of the mobile phone or device. Once disconnected from the computer, the user may browse and navigate through the downloaded pages without any latency. Furthermore, because there are no wireless bandwidth considerations, the content presented may be more graphically oriented.
An example of this type of service is iAnywhere Solutions, Inc.'s AVANTGO™. However, the trade-off made for the low latency is the fact that the data being viewed is no longer dynamic Web content. The AVANTGO™ methodology simply stores the pages on a device. Those pages remain the same until the user can again connect to the Internet to retrieve updates.
One improvement, which was applied to the microbrowser paradigm, is generally referred to as a push browser service. Instead of waiting for a user to request a particular Web page, the push browser is proactively sent an HTML or WML page from the server. Therefore, when a user accesses the microbrowser, at least some content is already resident on the device, which initially reduces the latency. The user's interaction remains the same as the regular microbrowser, which basically mimics the user interaction of Web browsers without the rich graphics. The limitation to the push browser is that only a limited number of HTML/WML pages are stored. Once the user navigates or browses through all of the stored pages, the advantages achieved by the push system are gone. Without the stored pages, new pages are generally downloaded from the Web server on request of the user, which results in the long latency periods experienced in the normal microbrowsers.
An addition to the push technology was attempted in POINTCAST INC.'s POINTCAST system. The POINTCAST system was an information system on a desktop computer which compiled and broadcast a wide variety of information items. Subscribers to this system would receive the broadcasts and store the information items locally. By entering preferences to the user's local system, the client-side application of POINTCAST would filter the presentation of the information to the user based on those user preferences. The POINTCAST server would periodically update the information items, which the user could then view if those updates corresponded to the items the user preferred to view. However, the bandwidth requirements for transmitting and receiving all of the information typically clogged networks and caused long periods of network latency. Users would typically experience slow network access and much-decreased available bandwidth for other interactions.